Guide To What DLCs to Buy from the Sale in What Order

Overview

This guide aims to help people, whether new or experienced, decide if a DLC is worth while to be purchased and which ones to pick up first.

Overview

As many of you already know, Stellaris is a game developed by Paradox Interactive. This, whether fortunate or unfortunately means that there is a great deal of DLC that gets published for the game with unique content that interacts with an upgraded base game content. This guide serves the purpose of which DLCs should you buy and if you have a finite budget, which ones should be bought first. If you like to disagree with my recommendations or would like to discuss this further, feel free to comment below!

Anniversary Portraits

This “DLC” is a gift from our paradox overlords. In case you do not already have it, here is a link for it. This DLC adds several portraits that i find work well with the MegaCorp empires, as they are very flaunting and lavish pictures.

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Utopia

The first, and most recommended DLC for players to pick up is Utopia. The reason for this, as many other players will tell you, is that a large majority of what is considered endgame content for your economy, habitation, and overall prosperity of your empire come from here. These include:

• The ability to build a multitude of space structures and megastructures including Ring Worlds, Dyson Spheres, Science Nexus, Sentry Arrays, and Habitats. before this DLC, the only way to obtain megastructures was by finding ruined ones throughout the galaxy.
• The Ascension Perk System being massively reworked to allow your empire to reach into its psionic potential, embrace the power of cybernetics, or perfect your species by perfecting its genome with genetic modification.
• Adds the ability to decide what rights and jobs your slaves receive in your empire; completely revolutionizing the gameplay within Stellaris and has become essentially a core piece of content to most other DLCs.

The only downsides to this DLC are both its price tag and that the AI tends to spam habitats, but this is the pinnacle of what a DLC should be and is easily worth its full price. A side note is that this is one of the DLCs that does go on sale for 50% off and we know a new DLC is in the works with the new development blogs.

Quote: “Paradise by the dashboard lights…”

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Apocalypse

The Apocalypse DLC is the second DLC that we recommend picking up after Utopia, as it overhauls what is used for conflict within the late game of Stellaris as well as adding a new midgame crisis through the unification of the khan. This DLC adds several aspects to the game, including:

• The Titan is a new class of ship that impacts a battle just by it being in the fight. These large ships offer aura slots that buff your fleets potential or lower your opponents when engaged and can drastically sway a fight if used correctly.
• The Colossus is an entirely new type of super-weapon ship. Although these massive ships require an ascension slot to even consider building and 10 years to do so, they completely change the game for the endgame crisis and even wars with other empires. instead of having to waste time and effort on landing armies on each one of their planets, you can just.. remove the planet Death Star style!
• The Marauders are a new force that spawns within the galaxy. these seemingly inconspicuous bunch of individuals are a group that may first appear as an annoyance, as they will demand tribute from you every so often or you risk their fleets raiding your planets for a time. However, they offer benefits that have saved my hide several times within my multiplayer sessions, as they offer to lend you out mercenaries to you if you have enough credits to make it worth their while.
• The Khan is a new crisis added with the Marauders empire, when these barbaric pillagers all unite behind a common cause: to conquer the galaxy. This mid-game crisis does scale with your crisis strength setting and has created some of the best teamwork experiences in our MP sessions as it forces us to work together or be destroyed. As a reward for killing the khan in combat, you will receive a powerful relic: the Khan’s Throne.

Although this DLC adds all these, there’s a little bit of non-combat related changes in this DLC, which are new civics.

Criticism of this DLC that I have seen and you should account for is that the “new” unity ambitions, became a free feature in update 2.2 Le Guin, as well as the DLC adding a lot less features than Utopia.

Quote: “Thats no moon…”

Leviathans

The Third Recommended DLC by us is not a major DLC, but a story pack instead. The Leviathans DLC is the first story pack that was added by Paradox and added:

• A large number of powerful entities throughout the galaxy. These offer a new kind of challenge to get unique technologies as rewards for defeating them, if not better relics if you have the Ancient Relics DLC.
• Nomadic peoples known as enclaves are scattered throughout the galaxy to offer you a wide variety of bonuses in exchange for energy credits. from the Curators offering you bonus science to additional influence from the artisans guild, these can save your planets from instability, if not worse.
• The War on Heaven is the most significant event that can happen within the galaxy with the exception of an endgame crisis. A galactic wide conflict will spark up when two sleeping rivals wake up and want to have another round with one another. You can choose to either take a side or fight them both in hopes that the new world can defeat the knowledge of the old.

This DLC adds so many interesting things in the galaxy, that its practically a must get as soon as possible. It just gives you as a player a much more unique experience in the galaxy!

Quote: “ALL HAIL THE WORM”

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Ancient Relics

In this Story Pack you will find many new ways to grant your empire the upper hand in this galactic churn:

• The main feature of this DLC is the Ancient Relics, to quote the Dev’s “Each relic gives significant benefits to your empire to aid in your interstellar escapades.” This includes the ability to convert hordes of Minerals to Alloys ready for your shipyards or to instantly transforming a normal world in to a Gaia world full of natural bounty.
• A brand new feature is the Archaeology system. In this system you will retrace the history of long forgotten empires to uncover artifacts and relics. They will provide your empire the upper hand if you can afforded to pay the science crews. Be warned the sites are covet by other empires and creatures
• Adds two new Precursor Civilizations, the Baol and the Zroni. Along with complete overhaul to the Precursor Civilizations systems. After ample investigation you can explore the home systems of the long gone empires and learn of their secrets and what lead to their demise.
• All new Planet type of Relic Worlds, these worlds were once homes to advanced civilizations are now empty and long forgotten. Though the infrastructure of the world is in a poor state of disrepair they can be brought back to their former glory. You can find Archaeological digs on these worlds that provide powerful relics.

This Story Pack adds well written events and lore to the game. The event chains are defiantly worth a read.

Quote: “It belongs in a museum!”

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Synthetic Dawn

Do you wanna build a robot? Well Synthetic Dawn is for you! Synthetic dawn is highly recommended for newer players as robotic empires are much simpler to learn considering the reduced resource management, rarer leader deaths, and 100% habitability on all worlds.

• Robot Empires – Play as machines, you build your pops and feed them energy! They are also modular allowing for easy specialization of your population.
• Robot Uprising – Robot workers gain the ability to revolt against their organic overlords!
• Robo Rights – gain the ability to set rights for your robotic workers

Quote: “you just can’t differentiate between a robot and the very best of humans.”
― Isaac Asimov, I, Robot

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MegaCorp

The Megacorp DLC is the 3rd major overhaul that was released by Paradox. This DLC Overhauls the entire economy system in Stellaris. Not only does this DLC add new advisors and AI roaming fleets, but also adds:

• The Addition of a whole new kind of empire known as MegaCorps allows players to benefit from the success of others and benefit their own positions by building trade offices on foreign empires capitals, sometimes tearing down the empires their benefiting from.
• The Overhaul to the Galactic Market adds a whole new tab for much more… lively stock. The slave market allows empires to get rid of unwanted people for a quick buck and empires that are looking to expand More quickly than their pop growth allows.
• There are many new Megastructures that got added alongside this DLC, which help economically, Diplomatically, and Militarily. This is dwarfed by the power of an Ecumenopolis, a city wide planet capable of producing hundreds of alloys, trade value, and consumer goods.

This DLC allows you to fix your empire the most efficently, safely, and allows people to experience the game from an entirely different point of view. Because of this, our group agrees that this one should be bought at full price and is one of the top choices to pick up in a sale!

Quote: “The Secret Is Crime”

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Federations

Federations DLC overhauls how everyone in the galaxy does diplomacy with one another. The galactic community overhaul allows for galactic wide buffs for anyone willing to participate in the political game and punish anyone that refuses to play by the rule of law. Not only that, but this DLC also includes:

• The ability to form different kinds of federations. These include Trade Leagues, Martial Alliances, Hegemony, and Research Cooperatives. These allow you to decide how much you want to specify what kind of agreement you want to form with others and each has its own kind of benefits for both leaders and members.
• The ability to customize the lore of your empire further than ever before as you get to chose what origins your empire originates from. whether you start as a Space Station Void Dwellers or Ring World Residents, you can customize your empire to a degree never seen before in the game.
• The whole new kind of ship class known as a Juggernaut not only allows you to offer a large buff to your fleets, but also is able to produce ships simultaneously. This, in combination of a mega-shipyard allows you to build ships at a new record rate.

Despite all of these changes, This DLC is more of a wait for sale than get immediately unless you know other players who play the game. This DLC is much better with friends as you get to buff each other much more than the AI can ever do.

Quote: “I love democracy.” – Sheev Palpatine

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Distant Stars

Distant Stars is one of the most… controversial decisions of preference among us writers of this DLC list. The reason for this is mainly the L-Cluster, a system of space outside the galaxy connected throughout the galaxy through special gates in black hole systems called L-Gates. These can be an amazing way to get from one side of the galaxy to the other, but also can be a major pain if the owner of the L-Cluster doesn’t properly defend it and it falls within hands of a hostile empire or even worse if the crisis gets a foot hold in there, as it lets it rapidly spread across the galaxy. This DLC also adds several new anomalies across the galaxies as well as other wierd anomalies in your space which can be combined with L-Gates insights to unlock the cluster.

Overall, I would recommend getting the DLC if you have the money for it, but only after you get the other DLC first. Distant Stars adds a mechanic which can overwhelm people that have not experienced this before. However, if you are a more experienced player i’d say the $10 price tag is worth full price once other DLC is bought.

There could be shadow galaxies, shadow stars, and even shadow people.
-Stephen Hawking

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Lithoids

The Lithoid Species Pack is considered by us as the best species pack by a short margin over the Necroids, because of one sole reason: the ability of them to impact the game. The Lithoid species adds something for every empire to use. Whether its the ability to colonize most if not all planets with super habitability, their ability to give minerals when made into live-stalk for the less.. ethical treatment of xenos.
Not only does this DLC add the lithoids species with 100% unique system of eating rocks instead of food, but it also adds unique species traits, a unique origin story, 15 new species traits including 1 robot portrait, a new ship set, a new advisor that gives you 100x the puns, and a new city portrait.
This is what a species pack should be. Not only does it impact the game for the player of the species pack, but also impacts the rest of the galaxy in a unique way that all empire types can utilize in its own way. If you were to get a species pack, i recommend this pack the most and is definitely worth full price on its own, and should be a pickup on sale!

Quote: “These Puns Rock!!”

Necroids

The Most Recent DLC for Stellaris is the Necroids DLC. Unlike the other species packs, Paradox decided to include new content with these packs, including 3 new civics and 1 new origin story alongside the 15 species portraits, ship set, and city set. This is in our opinions a far superior product to the other two story packs listed below as this does lead to a much greater game impact and even has unique game play styles associated with it.
The reason this is not higher on the list has to do with two factors: the skill floor of this DLC and that there’s other products that add more to the game and have a much bigger game impact for their price. This DLC is not very new player friendly as you have to know how the new features of your empire work and how interactions with other empires work. Because of this, I can not recommend it at full price for a new player, however the experienced player should consider picking it up at full price but both types of players should get it when at half off. this is what a species packs should be.

Quote: “Some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I am wiling to make.”

Humanoids

The Humanoid Species Pack is what happens when Paradox saw what their plantoid pack earned them and said “I want to do that again!” This pack is identical to what is included in the plantoid pack, but is humanoid portraits instead. this pack includes 15 humanoid portraits, including portraits that look similar to star trek characters, a unique humanoid ship pack, which might it be added works very well for machine empires too, and a unique city building style. however at the price of $7.99, I can not recommend to anyone to get this pack. maybe at half price if you want to be space dwarves, but that’s really it.

Quote: “There goes the planet!”

Plantoids

The Plantoid Species Pack is the first every DLC for stellaris post-release, so it has to be the best, right? WRONG! This DLC is one of the least important bits of code that has been in the game, and at a costly price tag of $7.99 outside of a sale. Granted this pack comes with a ship pack, city pack, and fifteen portraits, it is no where near what any of us guide writers would consider close to a good deal. Maybe on sale I would consider getting it for a few of the funnier pictures like the cabbage people, but its really the same as humanoid pack and is the reason it is a maybe with the sale.

Quote: “Maybe broccoli doesn’t like you either!”

Stellaris: Galaxy Edition Upgrade Pack

The Stellaris: Galaxy Edition

If you deperately want to throw more money at Paradox but have run out of DLC to purchase, the Galaxy Edition upgrade will net you some fancy cosmetic additions to the game. There are also some digital goodies such as an e-book, a signed screensaver, and the games soundtrack.

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Stellaris: Complete Soundtrack

The Stellaris Soundtrack is something that you purchase if you want to support Paradox more than you already are. I do not have this product, but I can only assume it has the new music in-game. but if you really want to listen to Stellaris music, you can always go to YouTube.

Stellaris: Infinite Frontiers (EBook)

To be honest, I do not know anyone who has read this, nor would recommend this. From what it describes itself as, it is a lore book for when the game released, however you can get much more from reading dig sites and events in-game to get better lore.